Menu Sign In Contact FAQ
Banner
Welcome to our forums

Looking for an old UK CAA VFR chart (UK post CAS infringement procedure)

I am looking for one which shows the danger area upper limit below without the “.0” i.e. “55” instead of “55.0”.

A chart I have from 2010 shows the “55.0” so one needs to go further back.

I will explain the reason for this in due course

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

Oldest that I have is edition 28. It doesn’t state a year, but edition 30 is 2007, so it’s probably 2005 or so.
It shows in the same format as above. 55.0.

So you’ll need earlier than that.

EIWT Weston, Ireland

I’m pretty sure I have one (must be early 2000s), but not to hand. How urgent is this?

Not urgent at all.

A lot of flying schools etc have ancient charts stuck on the wall in a cafe, etc.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

Got one:

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

I will explain the reason for this in due course

?

EGKB Biggin Hill

I will post the answer in a few weeks’ time.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

OK here we go…

If you bust CAS here in the UK, and you only just clipped it i.e. it isn’t bad enough for the CAA to go straight for a prosecution, you get an online tutorial to read (on why one should not bust CAS) and then sit a 20-question online exam (pass mark 17/20) which is time limited to 15 mins (45 seconds per question). The obvious pretence is that the exam will be based on the tutorial…

The discovery that the questions mostly don’t relate to the tutorial is quite a nasty surprise for those who read the tutorial really really carefully but is clearly intended to ensure that most people fail the exam. I failed by 1 question.

The questions are out of a PPL QB which we now know is probably 18 years old. I spoke to someone in the CAA the other day who said the questions are current and have recently been reviewed by some consultancy… The question which triggered this discussion is this one

which doesn’t exist on any CAA VFR chart today. I had the chart in front of me but had to guess…

To make it harder and to increase the pressure, you cannot do the easy ones first and go back, and you cannot modify an answer made previously. Some questions are nonsense; I reckon this one is one of the candidates:

where surely the only right answer is that you set 1013 on the altimeter! Nobody should be doing mental maths on barometric altimetry when flying under an airway defined as a FL. According to a CAA guy I spoke to, many people do that, but surely the exam should not be encouraging that?

The CAA people involved do not reply to correspondence (all calls, about 30 attempted, lead to answering machines, emails go nowhere, and even special delivery mail is “lost” after being signed for – I actually verified the last two with a phone call which eventually got through, after I decided to “sit” on the CAA switchboard until I got a real live person) requesting credit for at least the one bogus question; they clearly want you to do the next stage. The guy I spoke to (the actual CAA CAS busts chief enforcer, no less, almost impossible to contact but I finally managed it) said they won’t credit any questions because “if you got the others right you would have passed”. This of course differs from the CAA policy in the IR etc where duff questions are credited individually and this usually turns a fail into a pass since nobody will bother contesting anything if they passed

Then you get a letter saying you are not capable of planning a flight and have 3 options: a “brain transplant” at the CAA HQ, re-sitting PPL air law and nav exams, and getting re-educated at a ground school session at a PPL school of your choice. Obviously almost everybody goes for the last one. The instructor (has to be a “CFI”) sends a letter to the CAA listing the topics covered.

I suppose it is better than a prosecution and a £5000 fine.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

Can you share details of your CAS bust?

Mainz (EDFZ) & Egelsbach (EDFE), Germany

Peter, Your experience sounds like an Idiotentest , an exam for drivers who got their license revoked in Germany. It’s allegedly extremely hard and set up to be failed. An entire industry has established around preparation training for that test.

Low-hours pilot
EDVM Hildesheim, Germany
92 Posts
Sign in to add your message

Back to Top